Interactive Media Practice MA

Program Overview

Interactive Media Practice MA

Overview

This exciting multidisciplinary Master's course is fully designed to reflect the needs of contemporary interactive media industries, bringing together creative technologies, interactivity, design practices, and entrepreneurship with the user in mind.

Course Structure

The course is divided into two semesters, with the following modules:

Core Modules

• Innovation and Interactive Design: Create your ideas within an ideation stage, develop, formulate the design of your innovative idea into a digital output such as an app or wearable, and translate this into a proof of concept (PoC), which is polished and professional.
• Mobile Apps and Wearables: Produce and design powerful mobile applications, professional practice, and the skills required for targeting mobile devices including wearables from concept to completion in alignment with current industry practices for maximizing commercial viability, for a consumer-faced outcome.
• UX Design and Development: Develop and design for emerging technologies enhancing the user experience for websites, interactive media, games, robotics, and the internet of things - through a series of challenging briefs.
• Hack Lab and Creative Technology: Equip students with advanced knowledge of managing and assembling ideas, using a wide variety of creative technologies and advanced programming, in a real-world context.
• Major Project: Negotiate a large-scale, self-determined, original, and inventive project, based upon several areas explored in the taught stage of the course.

Option Modules

• Digital Marketing: Examine the role of Digital Marketing within the eMarketing context, providing students with advanced knowledge of how to use web-based technologies to develop, run, and manage digital marketing campaigns.
• Digital Technologies and Communication Policy: Offer a comprehensive introduction at the postgraduate level to the politics of communication technologies and the role policy plays in shaping their development, deployment, and usage.
• Self-Representation and Digital Practice: Explore the use of different media practices as a means for people to tell personal stories about their own lived experience, examining the roots of participatory media, considering different approaches to personal storytelling, and exploring a range of established practices.
• Theories of Communication: Cover a range of theoretical approaches to studying media and communication in a loosely historical order, acquiring an understanding of the historical contexts in which these ways of thinking emerged, being introduced to the leading thinkers driving these approaches, and to key concepts associated with them.
• Start-up Incubator and Digital Entrepreneurship: Engage with the critical evaluation of project management and entrepreneurship within the creative industries, as well as required research methods and transferable skills for the program.
• Researching Media and Communication: Introduce students to some important methods in social and media research, looking at how to undertake selective quantitative and qualitative research methods, understanding and exploring the different stages of the research process.

Entry Requirements

• A minimum of an upper second-class honors degree (2:1) or a lower second-class honors degree (2:2) in a relevant degree or with relevant experience.
• If your first language is not English, you should have an IELTS 6.5 overall, with at least 5.5 in each element.

Fees and Funding

• UK tuition fee: £10,900 (Price per academic year)
• International tuition fee: £18,000 (Price per academic year)
• Alumni discount available
• Funding options available, including Student Finance England (SFE) and scholarships

Careers

• The Interactive Media Practice MA offers an ideal foundation for those seeking employment in the digital media industries, which increasingly require people who can work with technology from a creative perspective.
• Develop in-demand skills, including digital transformation, innovation design, interaction design, and UX design/development.
• Graduate employers include Arm, Citibank, Critical Techworks, Deloitte, and Inmarsat.

Teaching and Assessment

• Teaching methods focus on active student learning through lectures, seminars, workshops, problem-based and blended learning, and where appropriate practical application.
• Assessment types include practical and coursework, with a focus on developing skills and knowledge in interactive media practice.

Location

• The course is based at the Harrow Campus, which is our creative and cultural hub, home to most of the university's arts, media, and digital courses.